Yugoslavia As The Crossing Of The Roads - Essay Example

Yugoslavia as the crossing of the roads In the following essay we will present Yugoslavia through what we believe is its main aspect: being the crossing of the roads. This term could be interpreted in many ways and this is exactly the reason why we have chosen to define Yugoslavia as such as we believe that Yugoslavia through the work of filmmakers and writers that we have studied is the clear representation of old and new issues of a mixed society. The co-existence of several religions within the same area has caused many tragedies all over the years.

Srdjan Dragojevic in "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame" (1997) gives us a perfect example of the results of such a diversity within a conflict. Milan the Serbian and Halil the Bosnian are childhood best friends. Nothing could separate them. Nothing except the Bosnian war. The two soldiers will become mortal enemies as each one will fight for one side in the split country. Moreover, the most interesting part of the movie which emphasizes our argument of Yugoslavia as being the crossing of the roads, is the construction of a tunnel between Belgrade (today's Serbian capital) and Zagreb (today's Croatian capital) in the early 1970s.

The tunnel ironically called the tunnel of Brotherhood and Unity was never finished and it takes an important role in the film as it would become the hiding place for Milan and his faction. Dragojevic through the tunnel presents an interesting point of view: the factors which used to bring the different ethnicities of former Yugoslavia are now the very reasons why they are fighting one against the other. Each of them crossed the road but they are not following their path, they are dangerously heading towards one another.

Aleksandar Tisma in his novel "The Book of Blam" (1998) presents u with another aspect of our argument. Not only Yugoslavia can be seen as a nest of multiple origins but also as the representation of all evil that ravaged the globe during the 20th century. Miroslav Blam, the main protagonist of the novel, is the only member of his family to survive the slaughter of Jews and Serbs on the banks of the Danube in 1942. Miroslav is suffering from the loss of everyone he loved - his family, his friends and a woman - and he is only left with the tragic hope that he will live to see another war and make the supreme sacrifice of facing the rifles - sacrifice he could not make in 1942.

What Tisma presents us in this novel is not only the history of a suffering man during the Second World War. The novel depicts a situation which will ultimately happen again but with a change of the role of the actors. The oppressed will become the oppressors and vice-versa. Finally, Dusan Makavejev with "Man is not a Bird" (1965) offers us an outlook of life during Tito's Communist regime. The movie tells the story of a factory engineer and his brief affair with a hair dresser. However, the movie mainly presents the madness and surrealism of Yugoslavia during that time and the ticking bomb that the Tito's government was triggering.

Man is not a Bird presents the isolation of all the characters as if living in the middle of all the different ethnicities and traditions would lead everybody to loneliness and despair. The ironies of friends who became enemies, the feeling of loneliness in such a cultural diversity or the repetitions of the atrocities of men are some of many aspects of Yugoslavia being the crossing of the roads of History.